PBCS, BICS, DBCS and ODI!!! Is that possible???

I just finished a very exciting project in Brazil and I would like to share how we put everything together for a 100% cloud solution that includes PBCS, BICS, DBCS and ODI. Yes ODI and still 100% cloud.

Now you would be thinking, how could be 100% cloud if ODI isn’t cloud yet? Well, it can be!

This client doesn’t have a big IT infrastructure, in fact, almost all client’ databases are supported and hosted by providers, but still, the client has the rights to have a good forecast and BI tool with a strong ETL process behind it right?

Thanks to the cloud solutions, we don’t need to worry about infrastructure anymore (or almost), the only problem is… ODI.

We still don’t have a KM for cloud services, or a cloud version of ODI, them basically we can’t use ODI to integrate could tools….

Or can we? Yes we can 🙂

The design is simple:

PBCS: Basically we’ll work in the same way we would if it was just it.

BICS: Same thing here, but instead of use the database that comes with BICS, we need to contract a DBCS as well and point the DW schema to it.

DBCS: here’s the trick. Oracle’s DBCS is not else then a Linux machine hosted in a server. That means, we can install other things in the server, other things like ODI and VPN’s.

ODI: we just need to install it in the same way we would do in an on premise environment, including the agent.

VPN’s: the final touch, we just need to create VPN’s between the DBCS and the client DB’s, this way ODI will have access to everything it needs.

Yes you read it right, we can install ODI in the DBCS, and that makes ODI a “cloud” solution.

The solution looks like this:

BICS: It’ll read directly from his DW schema in the DBCS.

PBCS: There’re no direct integration between the PBCS and DBCS (where the ODI Agent is installed), but I found it a lot better and easy to integrate them using EPM Automate.

EPM Automate: With EPM Automate we can do anything we want, extract data and metadata, load data and metadata, execute BR and more. For now the easiest way to go is create a script and call it from ODI, passing anything you need to it.

VPN’s: For each server we need to integrate we’ll need one VPN created. With the VPN between the DBCS and the hosts working, use ODI is extremely strait forward, we just need to create the topology as always, revert anything we need and work in the interfaces.

And that’s it. With this design you can have everything in the cloud and still have your ODI behind scenes! By the way, you can exactly the same thing with ODI on premise and as a bonus you can get rid of all VPN’s.

In another post I’ll give more detail about the integration between ODI and PBCS using EPM Automate, but I can say, it works extremely well and as far I know is a lot easier than FDMEE (at least for me).